The following post was put together by the moderation team following a lengthy consultation period and outlines exactly what rules are in place so that everyone is clear. From January 2019 onward this will apply to all the forums and subforums related to my games (TEW, WMMA, WreSpi, and CBH).

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Recently there have been an increasing number of arguments and general negativity around the GDS forums. Part of this comes from the moderators of the forums not stepping in quickly or strongly enough to deal with these incidents, and part of this comes from the lack of open knowledge of what the rules are. With that in mind, here are the rules we will be working with from January 2019....

1. Be respectful. Above all else it's important to be respectful of others by treating them with the same respect you expect from them. Many of the arguments on the forums could be avoided by following this simple rule.

2. If you want to use someone else's work, ask first. Most people are perfectly happy to let others use their work as long as they get credit, but please ask permission first. Content creators can also ask to have their work removed at any time too. We at GDS also have no problem with content creators hosting their work on other sites and communities, that is their decision and should be respected as such.

3. The only exception to the above rule is that the default data that comes with TEW, WMMA, WreSpi, or CBH is free to use for anyone and permission does not have to be asked.

4. No personal attacks, no insults, no flaming, no trolling, and no swearing. People don't respond well to this, so if you are engaging with someone not only will your point largely be lost, but you will look bad in the process. This is a family-friendly forum, so people all of all ages and background should feel welcome here. Swearing in particular is generally blocked but is somewhat more lenient in the diary sections as part of the writing there. Bigoted posts, such as homophobic, racist, or sexist comments, will all be harshly punished.

5. Do not feed the trolls. Rather than engage with someone who is engaging in negative behaviours, please report the posts. The top right hand side of each post has a triangle sign with an exclamation mark in it. Use that to report any posts that don't meet the requirements and leave the mods to handle it.

6. No piracy. Whether talking about streams, games, etc, none of this is acceptable on the forums. There is also absolutely no trading of GDS games on the site, as creating and encouraging a black market for games is obviously a bad idea for GDS. There is a zero tolerance approach to piracy and anyone caught breaking this rule will be banned immediately.

7. As a family friendly community that extends beyond the confines of this site, any links to Discord communities, facebook groups, YouTube dynasties, LetsPlays, and other similar content communities must also be family friendly. Many GDS moderators are already involved in these communities and any GDS users seen to be posting any non-family friendly content on will see all links to those communities removed. Please note that in exception circumstances we will consider banning users from the GDS forums if their behaviour elsewhere is particularly bad.

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To help the GDS forum moderators better look after the community we will be keeping track of all disciplinary actions taken. Doing this should help us to stay consistent in our handling of any future incidents, as in the past we were working independently of each other to apply the rules. We will be working together more in future, using the following system to deal with incidents.

For a minor offence, we will generally send you a PM but take no further action. We will however be keeping track of any messages sent on our own moderation server, so getting a bunch of these messages will eventually lead to the next step.

For a direct rules violation (or multiple minor offences), we will give a formal warning. This is to let you know that you've done something against the rules and is intended to stop things from escalating. We operate a points system, where warnings are generally worth one point, and accumulating three points within a short space of time leading to a short automatic suspension. These warnings generate a private message that will explain why you are getting the warning, usually quoting directly from the post that led to this action.

For a major rules infraction or multiple warnings over a longer period of time, we will ban you. In the case of multiple warnings, a ban will never just be one moderator stepping in to do this, it will be done with discussion to make sure it's democratic. This is to avoid us having any personal bias or opinion on the matter and make it clear that it's a community decision. As all moderators are active members of the community this is about as fair as things can be.

In all cases, we will try to leave up posts and threads that break the rules so that people can see what is and isn't allowed. But there will inevitably be times where this won't be possible and we will go in to edit posts, delete posts, close threads or remove entire threads. We don't like having to do this, and I'd like to reiterate that we do this in our own free time when we should be playing games, but sometimes it will need to be done.

Hopefully this will lead to a happier community overall going forward. If anyone has any questions that they would like to ask or any suggestions for ways to improve this then feel free to let us know (the moderators for each subforum can be found in the lower right hand corner). We all want this to be a place of fun, and we are always open to looking at ways to improve things as much as we can.